Wheat grows in a test field at Oregon State University in Corvallis. Some scientists believe that there’s a chance that genetically modified wheat found in one farmer’s field in May is still in the seed supply. Photo: Natalie Behring/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The strange case of genetically engineered wheat on a farm in Oregon remains as mysterious as ever. If anything, it’s grown more baffling.

As we reported almost two months ago, the presence of this wheat was revealed earlier this spring when a farmer in eastern Oregon sprayed a field with the weedkiller glyphosate, or Roundup. Most vegetation died, as the farmer intended, but clumps of green wheat stalks kept growing. They apparently had sprouted from grain that was leftover in the field from last year’s crop.

It was such a strange sight that the farmer wondered if this wheat might be genetically modified to be resistant to glyphosate, just like the popular Roundup Ready versions of corn and soybeans. He called a weed scientist named Carol Mallory-Smith at Oregon State University to ask her opinion.

“I said I didn’t think so,” recalls Mallory-Smith. The biotech company Monsanto had developed such wheat years earlier, and carried out field trials of it, but those trials ended at least eight years ago. Monsanto never asked for government approval to sell such wheat, and growing it without a permit from the U.S. Department of Agriculture actually would violate the law.

“So I was pretty skeptical, but I said, ‘If you send me some samples, I’ll test it,’ ” Mallory-Smith says.

To her surprise the tests came back positive. She passed the samples on to the USDA, which confirmed her results and launched an investigation.

The USDA is trying to answer two big questions about this wheat. First, where else can it be found? Second, how did it get into this farmer’s field?

Hundreds of millions of dollars could hang on the answer to the first question. If rogue genes are present in America’s wheat harvest, some customers — especially in Japan and Korea — say they won’t take it.

Fortunately for American wheat farmers, the search so far has come up empty. Korea has been testing shipments of U.S. wheat and the USDA has tested thousands of samples collected from farms and seed companies — including the business where that Oregon farmer bought his seed. They’ve found no GMOs, anywhere.

Blake Rowe, CEO of the Oregon Wheat Commission, expects Japan, which has suspended its purchases of U.S. wheat, to resuming buying when it’s sure the wheat is GMO-free. “We’re confident they will come back to the market, but there’s a lot of concern about how quickly that will happen,” he says.

Every test that comes up negative eases the worries of the wheat industry, but it also makes the source of this GMO wheat a bigger mystery. Investigators are finding no trail that leads from the Oregon farm back to Monsanto’s research operation.

Across the wheat-growing areas of the Pacific Northwest, farmers and wheat dealers now are trading speculative theories about how this might have happened.

As for a motive, “there are folks who don’t like biotechnology and would use this as an opportunity to create problems,” Fraley continued. He speculated that anti-biotech activists may have stolen wheat from one of Monsanto’s field trials of GMO wheat. They could have stored this grain for a decade, then planted it in a field and waited for a farmer to discover it.

Zemetra thinks an ordinary mistake is more likely: that somebody involved in Monsanto’s GMO wheat trials just happened to misplace a bag of wheat at some point. “Or you have a bag that gets mislabeled and gets put on the shelf and just sits there,” he says.

In this scenario, somewhere along the way someone picks up that bag and treats it like normal, conventional wheat seed. Some goes to that farm. Maybe the amount of GMO wheat is so small that tests now miss it.

Bernadette Juarez, an official with the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service who is in charge of the investigation, says the agency is now analyzing the genetic makeup of the GMO wheat, to figure out exactly which genetic variety of wheat it is. This will be a clue to its source; it should pinpoint, for instance, which of Monsanto’s many different field trials involved that variety.

Maybe investigators will be able to pick up a trail of rogue wheat leading from one of those trials to the farm in eastern Oregon. If not, the case may remain a mystery.

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Jered

Most seed wheat goes through a series of machines: harvester, augers, storage bins, seed cleaners, baggers, drills. If any one of these machines were not cleaned properly, you have contamination. The people hurt when copyrighted GM seed shows up where it should not be are farmers and consumers. Farmers no longer have control over the seed cost (seed companies have been winning the lawsuits on stray GM corn) or genetics (GM seed has been regenerating which makes it near impossible to keep separated from other seed) and consumers no longer have control over what goes into their bodies. Seed companies keep saying that they have this stuff handled, they don’t.

RobertWager

Lets be clear of the facts here. The farmer never grew GM wheat during the testing phases a decade earlier. The farmer did not find any GM wheat in any other field. the farmer did no use dedicated equipment for the one positive field. the farmer did not buy separate seed for that one field. The same lot of seed that was sold to the farmer was tested and came back negative. The GM wheat was found in clumps not rows. After thousands of tests no other wheat anywhere else has a trace of GM content.

Put all this together and intentional planting is by far the most likely (and in my opinion the only) possibility that fits all of the available data.

I would be very interested if someone can come up with an alternative that fits all the data.

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